Dear Katie,
Just a brief note from the office to tell you how much your mother and I enjoyed your first faculty profile. It was excellent. I had the feeling I was talking to him. The typography was lousy but that’s not your problem. I also liked the photo.
A good profile article gives insights into an individual’s personality. You achieved this to some degree on your first effort but keep digging. Ask some of your subjects about their thoughts for the future. Where is the University heading? What problems do they foresee?
Again, you did a good job and we are proud of you.
Love,
Dad
I was grateful for my father’s guidance through the years. He was almost giddy when I told him my eighth-grade English teacher had read my essay in front of the class. It was his idea for me to intern at radio stations in the summers during college. But I also understood his vicarious interest. Not only had he been forced to give up journalism, but what he’d given it up for wasn’t really working out either.
It was a Saturday during high school. My mother was making sandwiches for lunch, stacking the tuna and egg salad several deep on a platter, as my dad and I sat down at the kitchen table. I distinctly recall babbling on in a very me-me-me kind of way about something I wanted to buy or do. And I can still see my mother standing stock-still by the table and fixing me with a look.
“Katie,” she said, “your dad lost his job.”
It was one of those indelible moments from childhood when you realize your parents are fallible. Vulnerable. They’re hurt—maybe even scared.
There was no rush to reassure me that everything would be okay like they normally would. I wasn’t the priority here—my parents had bigger things on their minds. My typically loquacious father was speechless, eyes downcast. I can never unsee his head bent in shame.
I’m not sure what happened. In retrospect, I don’t think schmoozing, a job requirement in PR, was my dad’s strong suit. But he got back on his feet, writing speeches and handling the media for various organizations—nursing homes, podiatrists, the National Association of Retarded Children （at a time when the nomenclature was far less enlightened）; he was also an adjunct professor at American University, teaching journalism and public relations, which he seemed to enjoy.
But it’s not an overstatement to say I pursued journalism for my father. Yes, the excitement of it quickly won me over. And yet the pleasure he took from my success in a profession he’d loved but had to leave was never lost on me. He couldn’t believe the stories I covered, the people I got to interview, the books I had inscribed for him by some of his favorite authors, from David McCullough to Sue Grafton. And, of course, the money I eventually made, so beyond anything we could ever have imagined. I never wanted that to be awkward between us, but the fact is, he reveled in it.
I was living the dream. Mine. And his.
11
Hot, Hot, Hot
MIAMI WAS FULL of flavor and color and noise in a way Atlanta and Washington just weren’t. My mom had always wanted me to work in a market like Chicago; she thought my friendly openness would play well in the Midwest. But there was just one problem: When I interviewed for a job in Chicago, the news director had zero interest.
Two other newcomers to South Florida at the time: Crockett and Tubbs, the Metro-Dade police detectives on Miami Vice, chasing down drug dealers and gunrunners in the blazing sun. Who could forget the pink and teal logo, the sexy title sequence that played like a music video with shots of Rolls-Royces, windsurfers, the Hialeah racetrack…everyone, including me, started pushing up the sleeves of their blazers to the elbow.
My embrace of the whole Miami Vice ethos included dating a Metro-Dade cop of my own—Commander Bill Johnson. As the police department spokesman, Bill was the person local reporters got the scoop from at a crime scene. Local reporters like me.
We first kissed on a rainy night in the parking lot of my apartment building in Coconut Grove, the kind of kiss where everything around you peels away. When we detached, Bill saw the rivulets of mascara staining my cheeks and said, “I think your eyebrows are running down your face.” I liked the way his tongue tasted after he’d been smoking.
Bill was divorced, with two towheaded boys. I brought him home to Arlington for Christmas and my mom took an instant dislike to him. Perhaps it was the gold chain or the mesh tank top or the fact that he went to the sidewalk outside our house to smoke. After we left, she was so unsettled, she called Wendy to make sure this wasn’t “serious.”
She didn’t have to worry. I really liked Bill, but I knew he wasn’t for the long haul—that’s one of the reasons I went out with him. I didn’t want anything or anyone getting in the way of my career.